North Carolina politicians have decried the climate-change science that makes Hurricane Florence so dangerous | Will Bunch

Kevin Orth loads sandbags into cars on Milford Street as he helps residents prepare for Hurricane Florence on Monday in Charleston, S.C.

GRACE BEAHM / THE POST AND COURIER

For most of the eastern United States, this is a week of high anxiety — fixated on a swirling red, green, and yellow blob at the bottom of the TV screen and the increasing certainty that the most powerful East Coast storm of our lifetimes is going to slam into the coastal Carolinas with a massive storm surge, destructive winds, and biblical flooding.

For Dr. Stan Riggs, a somewhat crusty marine geologist at East Carolina University entering his ninth decade on Mother Earth, and for his fellow North Carolina scientists, the expected landfall of Hurricane Florence as a potentially lethal Category 4 or 5 storm later this week is the day they've seen coming for a long time.

If North Carolina's leaders were to take these new realities of climate change seriously, they would remap flood zones to curb runaway over-development along the Atlantic coast and spend hundreds of millions of dollars elevating roads or building new waste-treatment plants. One of the worst consequences of the rising ocean — which is occurring faster in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region than in other parts of the world — would be the amplified storm surge in a direct hit from a major hurricane.

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Armed with the scientific evidence, the North Carolina legislature sprung into action.

Speaking by telephone Monday from his campus office in Greenville, N.C. — a city that was inundated with up to six feet of water in 1999's Hurricane Floyd and now sits directly in the path of Florence — Riggs told me how North Carolina "had a plan to deal with sea level and climate change, but they took it off the table and pulled the rug out from under the scientific panel."

In 2016, Riggs quit the advisory board rather than further alter his findings to please the pro-development whims of Republican lawmakers. "I'm an older person — I'm not wasting any more of my life on bull—-," he told me. Instead, he works now with a growing network of town and county officials on the Carolina coast who take climate science seriously and are taking steps to fight back.

If you live in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Virginia, you should not be reading this column. You should be boarding up your home and protecting your valuable possessions before you protect the most valuable possession of all — yourself and your family — by evacuating to higher ground. The threat to life and property posed by Hurricane Florence has become so severe that even President Trump took a break from his anti-FBI tweetstorms to offer some sound advice.

The Storms in the Atlantic are very dangerous. We encourage anyone in the path of these storms to prepare themselves and to heed the warnings of State and Local officials. The Federal Government is closely monitoring and ready to assist. We are with you!

If you don't live in Florence's immediate path, this seems like the perfect time to look up from the rotating red blob on your TV screen for a few minutes and talk about a) why storms, floods, and droughts are setting unthinkable records for their intensity; b) why in America it's been such good politics to embrace such bad science, or — more accurately — no science at all; and c) what are we going to do about this climate mess once the damage from Flo finally ebbs.

Of course, many readers are going to say that now is not the right time to mix weather and politics — because hurricanes and wildfires are becoming the mass shootings of the climate-change debate, where saying anything in a moment of crisis beyond offering our thoughts and prayers to the afflicted is crass and inappropriate. But thoughts and prayers won't help the mostly underprivileged residents of the low-lying Carolinas any more than they saved gunshot victims in Parkland. The reality is there's no better time to talk about our failure to take climate politics seriously than on the eve of a natural disaster that global warming is making worse.

Which leads right into the other thing many readers are going to say, which is that tropical storms have long been a part of life in a place like the Carolinas — I mean, they have a pro hockey team called the Hurricanes, for cryin' out loud. True, and they've survived the above-mentioned Floyd in 1999, or Hurricane Hugo, a major hurricane that struck the Carolinas in 1989, among others.

But Hurricane Florence is not normal. If the current projections from the National Hurricane Center hold up, Florence will make landfall in North Carolina as a Category 4, the most powerful hurricane to hit that far north on the U.S. Atlantic coastline since humans began tracking them. You can add that to the recent spate of weather records — unprecedented wildfires from California to Northern Europe, or Houston's epic 2017 flooding after Hurricane Harvey — branded by a changing, hotter climate that brings lengthy droughts played off against a moister atmosphere and warmer oceans that intensify storms.

Call me a godless cynic, but I don't think Pat Robertson's idea is going to work. I hope I'm wrong. I truly hope that Flo pulls a 180 and drifts into the oblivious sea. And if it does, or — heaven forbid — if it doesn't, maybe Florence will be The One that finally causes the tide to turn, that causes our future climate policies to again be informed by sound science and not by political demagoguery. Because thoughts and prayers don't work any better on hurricanes than they do against AR-15s — but we mortal humans can make a real difference on climate.